i would just like to vocalise my utter disbelief at how incompetent and dishonest Absolute Design Barnsley aka Smart Merchant aka Absolutewebdesign.co.uk have been.

Our company signed up just over a year ago to their Absolute Design Smart Merchant shopping cart website system.

To overview, this is a pay-monthly service where they host the site and we add products to the CMS style website that Absolute Design have produced.

Being a small family business we opted for this kind of pay monthly service as it would (we hoped) give us some level of support from Absolute Design Barnsley to help with the running of the site.

At first they were helpful at getting the site setup initially but months down the line and after phonecalls or online chats with Absolute Design , the result has been no action being taken as requested.

Simple things like removing the option for other currencies... I phoned in August of 2008 and was asked to email the request to Absolute Design Barnsley , which i did. Did the other currencies get removed? Nope! I phoned and emailed many times.

This year due to the economic climate we have had many price changes to do, so i phoned Absolute Design Barnsley and asked for a holding page to be put up while i changed all the prices.

I was told this would be done within the hour.

I had my doubts that this would actually happen due to past experience, and indeed a WEEK later and the holding page STILL was not up.

During this week we had several people try and buy things at the old prices and we had to cancel orders. This is obviously frustrating for us and the customers.

Due to Absolute Design 's Smart Merchant poor system i since found out i was unable to 'turn off' the shop in any way except for basically deleting the entire payment gateway setup.

Products were also still viewable at old prices via google, even if i disabled them in the CMS itself. BAD Smart Merchant !

Also in this time i managed to decide and almost fully populate a new website for our shop, it seem's Absolute Design Barnsley cannot even produce a holding page in that same space of time.

Now, you may think why didnt i just leave? Well, after that week i rang up and asked to cancel, i was asked why and i CALMLY stated my reasons, which were basically poor support.

This resulted in Andy Clegg from Absolute Design Barnsley saying to email my request to leave and he slammed down the phone.

I emailed my request to change our Domain IPS tag and contact details and within a few minutes our website had been deleted BUT Absolute Design Barnsley decided to delete the IPSTAG for the domain, basically rendering the domain useless, including our email which we use on a daily basis.

I spoke Absolute Design again on the webchat (on a friday) and asked them to change the IPStag again, they said ok, but it probably wont get done till Monday.

I was obviously doubtful as it didnt take them long to delete the IPSTAG....

Monday comes and Absolute Design still haven't changed the IPSTAG. We are shut on mondays so i rang on Tuesday and spoke to Craig. He seemed more reasonable and said he would change it shortly. Several hours later and Absolute Design Barnsley still had'nt changed our IPSTAG and were still basically holding our domain hostage.

I ring up AGAIN, speak to craig, he says hold on for a moment, about a minute later they just hung up the phone again. I ring once more and noone answers...

Instead of swift switchover to the new site, Absolute Design Barnsley have forced us to take action with Nominet to recover our domain.

This just seems ridiculous, I'm guessing Absolute Design Barnsley must be losing alot of customers but to act the way they have is just childish.

What is the point of causing so much agro just because someone wants to cancel?

I've just moved from a reseller account with ResellerZoom, so a VPS with SolarVPS.

When I was with RZ all my scripts could write to folder with the 755 permissions. On the vps I have to alter the folder I want the script to write to to be 777.

Which the is best and most secure?

I think I understand that if a folder is 777 then anyone on the server can write to that folder. So I assume some sort of thing that stops users being able to access folders outside of their own folders is needed? is that right?

I have a server running php 5.2.4 with CGI as Server API and suexec, but I cant create dirs in php with chmod 755. When I use mkdir("/home/user/public_html/$dirname", 0755); it creates the dir with chmod 744. Why?

I can change later this chmod to 755 in php with the chmod function. But why my server doesnt allow the directory to be created as 755? Where can I configure it?

I was wondering if it were possible to chmod a directory that is set to a low number to 777 using a shell or command and if so can anyone point me in the right direction as to how to go about doing so ??? I am trying to learn a little and i pefer using my browser to edit files rather then a ftp client.

I just moved my folder_A from computer A to computer B, what is the command to change the permission of owner, access, group for every files in that folder_A at 1 time?

in the folder_A has hundred of files. Let's say , i want to change owner = laptop, access = read and write, group = user, access = read and write , what is the specific command to do that for all the files in folder_A at 1 time?

I've recently moved to a new server in which I don't have root, so bare with me.

For some reason when I upload a file with 'move_uploaded_file($tmpName,$new_filename)', it seems to work fine - but when I check it, try to download it (http or ftp), or change the permission - I can't, because its set to 600 for some odd reason, and owned by the user Apache is setup on.

I have my web server hacked several times and I am beating my head against the wall trying to find the problem(s).

Way back when my sites have been defaced and CHMODing my *.html files to 744 seemed to have done the trick

Now someone has put a phishing site somehow, which by the way I'm not able to remove still, I can't help but to think that I may have more CHMODing to do, I have recursevly set my site to 755, shoud this do the trick? I know I need to chmod .htaccess and alike files to 644, but what about...imagesCGI/PHP?cssetc?

I thought I should share with everyone my terrible experience with 123-Reg's dedicated servers.

I'd had one of their Linux servers for about 2 years when it suddenly stopped responding. I emailed their support team (there is no telephone support for dedicated server customers for some reason) who responded saying that the hard drive had failed and that they'd assign a new server to our account and copy over the data (if still readable) asap.

After a few days they responded again to my original support ticket explaining that they were unable to assign a new server to my account and that I'd have to go through the order process again. I did this and waited for them to try and copy the data over; the only response to this was that they'd "request that a technician connect the old hard drive to the new server", and the support ticket status was updated to "solved", despite the fact that it clearly wasn't.

Days turned into weeks and not a single byte of data had been copied across. I opened yet another support ticket asking when they would do this, and this is the response I got:

"You will need to login as Administrator and copy files across. If you want us to copy certain files, we need to know what directories you want copied and there will be a charge of £100+VAT."

That's right, £117.50 for them to restore our data despite it being COMPLETELY THEIR FAULT that the server had gone offline. I could possibly understand the charge if somehow I'd managed to cause the hard drive failure but obviously this was not the case.

I seriously have no idea how they expect to be able to justify this charge.

So you might be thinking, "why not just login as administrator and copy it across yourself?" Good question - unfortunately they only give administrator or root access to customers who request it via their control panel, and those who do request root access subsequently forfeit any software updating/patching/configuration or technical support. In other words, I had to sacrifice all this if I wanted my data back, which was not an acceptable course of action for me as I am in no way a qualified server administrator.

One of the reasons I went with 123-Reg in the first place is that they promised from the outset to take care of all server maintenance for me.

As I'm typing this, the server (and consequently all sites on it) has been offline for over a month and I have come to the conclusion that 123 are utterly incompetent server providers. I'm going to cancel my account immediately and take my business elsewhere, and assure people that staying well away from this company will be the best decision you ever make.

i would avoid virpusnetworks.net as they do not issue refunds when they clearly state 14 days moneyback. They blantly ignore me for anything to do with refunding and also they messed up the hosting for me to begin with. Making me lose a few days waiting for them to set it up CORRECTLY they set it up but didn't include the correct password so i couldn't access it.

Anyway i still not got my money back and if i was you guys try find a different provider when it comes to peace of mind with money back.

i recommend these vps providers:

vpsland and solarvps both outstanding companys, hope to see more of them

We read a large number of reviews and ratings before deciding on whom to go with for our VPS. In particular, the good marks for helpful technical support by SLHost staff as recommended by various posters here led us to go with them.

We paid six months in advance on February 12.

Unfortunately, it has been a nightmare. A few days after we signed up and went through the arduous process of moving data and reconfiguring the sites after the move, which consumed a total of 24 hours or so in 7 days, all was well until we ran into what apparently is a network problem. It remains and has gotten worse. We'll be leaving as soon as we find a new VPS host.

Whether a victim of their own success (perhaps they're too busy to look into things for us) or that they were simply overrated, the tech support is somewhat terse and when it came to a real problem, we were completely ignored. The issue is that the sites are unreachable and incredibly slow for 10-30 minute stretches, beginning during US nighttime from 10 p.m. - 2 a.m. Pacific. After about a week and countless more emails sent and received between their tech support, it began happening during the daytimes too. Tech support insists that there is nothing they can do, but it is exclusively our sites that we can't contact, and that goes for our users as well. They have said unless we have our site's users (who aren't computer technically proficient people and are very confused when we try to give them instructions on how to run a traceroute) run traceroutes as well, they don't have enough evidence there is a problem. This, despite the fact that there is a large discussion about it with various users from around the globe reporting the problem alongside their location. I linked them to this, and they dismissed it.

I advised them I would be making a report of my extremely poor experience with their services on this website. They dismissed that too. They are either overwhelmed, or it is what it appears to be: they simply couldn't care less.

Double billed. They cannot keep their servers running. Over one week and still no customer support for vps and a hosting account. After a week they have begun to respond to the server down tickets but they do nothing. Not even reimage. Seems they just take your money and run. All information on the sites is gone. All number 1 search engine ranking gone.

If you enjoy talking to voicemail then this is the site for you.

Now I have to work things out with the credit card company.

Will fly to Singapore tomorrow to see if the company exists and to contact a law firm.

My experience with 98ways.com was not bad when I signed up but about 2 days later the service went down and now about 3 days in it is still down. So I emailed a few times their admin@98ways.com email address asking to cancel / refund but the email address bounced back to me. This was the email address my invoice came from. So I cancelled my paypal subscription and emailed the address my payment went to "ollie.szczypka@googlemail.com" figuring it was a business email address since they use it for payments.

What I was upset about is if this company wants to make a go then they have to be reputable... Email their customers if they are having problems, give refunds when necessary, etc... The initial month was only $1.50 but its the point of it all... And I could have sworn I read a notice about a 14 day money back guarantee.....

We have been in trouble with BTN network since the earth quake in Taiwan. Meanwhile we dont have direct connection with BTN, the upstreams in our datacenter have peering with them. When making traceroute, it shows data from servers to customers routed through BTN. But the staff in datacenter said they cannot do anything to prevent this

Probably should've backed up my files more often, but that is hard to do when in the process of developing multiple sites.

I'll start by telling you exactly what happened.

Yesterday, at approximately 5:45PM I had checked my email, to my dismay i found that my payment had bounced due to the fact that I had forgotten to update my billing info (I was using my temp credit card until my new one had arrived in the mail). When I logged in to paypal, i had found Leeware had canceled my subscription making it impossible for me to get a payment in. At this point i had contacted trying to resolve the situation ASAP. After a series of emails i had found out that they had destroyed my server, and all files that were on it, including multiple sites which i had spent the last 3 weeks working full time hours a week on.

Reading through the TOS I found many half truths and full lies. When I signed up I had read

Quote:

It is your responsibility to make sure you have the funds to cover your subscription and resolve any problems which result in funds not being available when they are due. You also agree that in some circumstances your original server will not be placed back online because it has been archived and will therefore, require the payment of a recovery fee of $25 to be restored.

Which I believed meant that my server would be archived and i would be able to pay the recovery fee if something like this was to occur. This however is obviously not the truth.

Quote:

Subsequent payments are due on the anniversary date of the month for that month's service.

Again, I was ready and willing to pay on the date stated above.

My advice to anybody thinking about going with leeware; don't. It's not worth the risk, unless you run a hobby site or something you wouldnt miss.

I got a VPS with Linode and I have installed CentOS 5.2 32-bit, Apache, MySQL and ProFTPd. The server itself runs very OK, however, I have issues with running 'chmod' on the user interface with either FileZilla or CuteFTP pro.

Whenever I try to chmod 777 on a directory, I got this error on the FTP client interface:

I am attempting to setup a script which will automatically append the proper file permissions [posix & acl's] to any new files on certain folders that I specify.

Someone Recommended

find /Users/Kevin/Desktop/TRANSFER -type f -exec chmod 777 {} ;

This only seems to run once and when new files put in I have to have the script run every so often as a cronjob, I really just want to have a script to change the permissions of files going into a folder.

How do I sweep my entire server and chmod a particular filename located in the cgi-bin to either 0, 755, etc?

For example, to disable a particular perl script running on my system on over 100 accounts in the /cgi-bin/file.cgi I want to chmod the file on every account that it comes up on that /cgi-bin/file.cgi needs to be chmod'd to 0.

My company rents machines and hosts our sites world wide. Lately we've seen a nice deal from MyDediServer here on WHT and rented out a QuadCore at a nice price.

We hoped that the "you get what you pay for" don't happen here but we were WAY wrong.

We started this weeks discovering the server is down. No access, no pings no SSH.

As there is no remote boot option I open an urgent ticket to support asking them to reboot the machine immediatly. After 2 hours of "we are on it" replies I chatted with their support only to be told "Admins will reboot it soon".

All and all it took them 12 (!!!) hours to reboot my machine and to top that when I've asked why it was down at the first place they ignored my questions (I've asked via ticket, email and support chat - all 3 ignored me).

I did claim it's either a DC, Network or machine problem yet they claim it is not.Machine messages log is clean and no shutdown was issued.

Anyway Today (2 days after) I got a newspaper article made about my site ($$$) and when I came online to see traffic I was shocked to find out that the machine is down and off the grid yet again (!).

A support ticket was opened again two hours ago and a reboot is yet to be seen.

My feedback - keep clear - don't use them and avoid them even if they hand out free 8-core machines (!). They seem to be a one man (if at all) show with no to low customer orientation and a non-existing to low-existing support.

My guess is that they have a "chat operator" in India while the DC control does only US prime time support hence when I ask for a reboot it won't happen till the DC guys wake up in the US which sucks.

I try to avoid trash talk as I hate that but these guys are the worst I've ever used (and I rented out at dozens of companies).

I have a long list of good reasons why not to use HostPapa. My fist major problem with them was that a couple weeks after I started being hosted by them I was told by one of their tech guys that I was not allowed to host my site on their server. What a rude awakening considering my page is only a PHP web based game that using only a tiny bit of system resources. The idiots they hire there thought I was running a game server for first person shooter games even when I specifically told them that I was running a small PHP game I wrote myself and there was nothing in their EULA that disallowed me from running my site. At least their head admin haves half a brain and said everything was fine, but from there on every time I contacted support I was harassed about running a PHP program on their server which was very annoying. If you are planning on using PHP or having your site being anything about games at all, HostPapa is not for you.

My second problem was the page not working, being very slow, or outright completely down. The site seemed to go down for about an hour or two every other week. Then came a couple BIG downs. In one case last month my site was down for most of a day and night. That is 24 hours. If you like your site to have more uptime than a free host then HostPapa is not for you.

Yes, then came the third problem I had with them. First, they force you to commit to one year because they know you will leave the moment you notice their crappy service, but they do advertise a 99.9% guarantee on the front page of their site. So, I wrote to their forum asking politely asking for the reminder of my year as a refund. I was rudely told that 99.9% does not mean my site. Yea, they don't mean your site is up 99.9% of the time even though they imply this. They only consider something down when the server you are on goes completely and utterly dead. To make things worse, unlike most other providers they don't have any server status andywhere and they will not respond to you if you ask. So, there is no way for me to tell if he was telling the truth or not. If you want a web host provider that does not cheat and lie HostPapa is not for you.

if it was not bad enough that HostPapa bailed out on their %99.9 uptime guarantee they deleted my post asking them about it on their forum without notice. Then, when I made another post politely asking why, they deleted that post; once again, without giving any reason to me. If you want a host you can trust and listens HostPapa is not right for you.

Please, do yourself a huge favour. If you are ever looking for a web host provider avoid HostPapa like the plague. Also, make sure you spend several; hours checking up on a host and don't take their own forums seriously unless you see bad things about them.

If there is nothing bad written about them on their own forum, chances are, they are deleting all the bad stuff. And make sure to check neutral places like this, webhostingtalk.com, where people rate their own host. I have done all this now and found a short list of very good host.